OMG! Big Brother will be watching!!

[azmouse]

This scares me for the future almost more than anything I've read lately. It seems like this technology could be so easily misused.

Link: http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20060213/D8FOE9CO1.html?PG=home&SEC=news


2 Workers Have Chips Embedded Into Them

CINCINNATI (AP) - Tiny silicon chips were embedded into two workers who volunteered to help test the tagging technology at a surveillance equipment company, an official said Monday.

The Mexico attorney general's office implanted the so-called RFIDs - for radio frequency identification chips - in some employees in 2004 to restrict access to secure areas. Implanting them in the workers at CityWatcher.com is believed to be the first use of the technology in living humans in the United States.

Sean Darks, chief executive of the company, also had one of the chips embedded.

"I have one," he said. "I'm not going to ask somebody to do something I wouldn't do myself. None of my employees are forced to get the chip to keep their job."

The chips are the size of a grain of rice and a doctor embedded them in the forearm just under the surface of the skin, Darks said.

They work "like an access card. There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door," Darks said.

Darks said the implants don't enable CityWatcher.com to track employees' movements.

"It's a passive chip. It emits no signal whatsoever," Darks said. "It's the same thing as a keycard."

CityWatcher.com has contracts with six cities to provide cameras and Internet monitoring of high-crime areas, Darks said. The company is experimenting with the chips to identify workers with access to vaults where data and images are kept for police departments, he said.

The technology predates World War II, but has appeared in numerous modern adaptations, such as tracking pets, vehicles and commercial goods at warehouses.

After Hurricane Katrina, as body counts mounted and missing-person reports multiplied, some morgue workers in Mississippi used the tiny computer chips to keep track of unidentified remains.

[Nightwing]

1. Mark of the Beast if you ask me

And no way in hell will I ever take it!!

[ET Awful]

3. I'm curious to see how many self-proclaimed "Christian" fundamentalists

will line up to get them despite their professed belief in Revelations and the like.

[azmouse]

4. That thought definitely came to my mind.

[Trillo]

2. You will be assimilated. n/t

[MercutioATC]

5. Fer chrissakes, people...it's VOLUNTARY!

If somebody volunteers to do this, what's the issue????

[azmouse]

6. And you can't see a day when it may not be voluntary???

When the chips were inserted into the dogs for identification I just knew it would be a matter of time til humans got them. What parent wouldn't want one for their child if the child could be found quickly if abducted? What employee wouldn't want a chip to enter a building because you don't have to worry about losing it the way a passcard could be lost? Who knows what info could be on the chips used? Do you trust the government to do this right? The way we can trust them as they do warrantless wiretaps?
I don't like anything about this story. I hope the program goes no further but I'm not hopeful about it.

[MercutioATC]

7. How long have tattoos been around?

They're still voluntary, as far as I know...

An RFID system to track people would be incredibly inefficient. RFID tags don't transmit, they're read (at short range) as they pass by a reader. To use them to monitor people in general would mean placing readers all over the place at huge cost.

I'm not concerned.